Part of 1. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government – in the Senedd at 1:35 pm on 15 February 2017.
Let me begin by agreeing with what Mike Hedges said. The policy of austerity is a self-defeating policy. It makes things worse rather than better, and that’s demonstrated from the practical impact that we see elsewhere. On the direct impacts of the spending cuts set out in the IFS’s green budget, what we know is coming the way of Wales is a reduction in our revenue of 8 per cent between the years 2009 and 2019, and a cut of 21 per cent in our capital budget between 2009 and 2019, and this is without the cuts of £3.5 billion that the UK Government continues to say it will impose in budgets in 2019-20. I met the Chief Secretary to the Treasury yesterday, with finance Ministers from Scotland and Northern Ireland. Together, we pressed on the chief secretary the need for the UK Government to abandon its plans for those very damaging cuts and the impacts that they would have on devolved administrations right across the United Kingdom.